Basil eBook

When I recovered my consciousness, I was lying on
the couch in my own study. My father was supporting
me on the pillow; the doctor had his fingers on my
pulse; and a policeman was telling them where he had
found me, and how he had brought me home.

PART III.

I.

WHEN the blind are operated on for the restoration
of sight, the same succouring hand which has opened
to them the visible world, immediately shuts out the
bright prospect again, for a time. A bandage
is passed over the eyes, lest in the first tenderness
of the recovered sense, it should be fatally affected
by the sudden transition from darkness to light.
But between the awful blank of total privation of
vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled,
there lies the widest difference. In the moment
of their restoration, the blind have had one glimpse
of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam
of brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling
cannot extinguish. The new darkness is not like
the void darkness of old; it is filled with changing
visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms,
rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every
second. Even when the handkerchief is passed
over them, the once sightless eyes, though bandaged
fast, are yet not blinded as they were before.

It was so with my mental vision. After the utter
oblivion and darkness of a deep swoon, consciousness
flashed like light on my mind, when I found myself
in my father’s presence, and in my own home.
But, almost at the very moment when I first awakened
to the bewildering influence of that sight, a new
darkness fell upon my faculties—­a darkness,
this time, which was not utter oblivion; a peopled
darkness, like that which the bandage casts over the
opened eyes of the blind.

I had sensations, I had thoughts, I had visions, now—­but
they all acted in the frightful self-concentration
of delirium. The lapse of time, the march of
events, the alternation of day and night, the persons
who moved about me, the words they spoke, the offices
of kindness they did for me—­all these were
annihilated from the period when I closed my eyes
again, after having opened them for an instant on
my father, in my own study.

My first sensation (how soon it came after I had been
brought home, I know not) was of a terrible heat;
a steady, blazing heat, which seemed to have shrivelled
and burnt up the whole of the little world around
me, and to have left me alone to suffer, but never
to consume in it. After this, came a quick, restless,
unintermittent toiling of obscure thought, ever in
the same darkened sphere, ever on the same impenetrable
subject, ever failing to reach some distant and visionary
result. It was as if something were imprisoned
in my mind, and moving always to and fro in it—­moving,
but never getting free.